by The end is nigh for NASA’s marsupial hunter.
So much dust is choking the solar power of NASA’s InSight lander that the Mars mission, operating well past its expiration date, is expected to shut down very soon.
“The spacecraft’s power output continues to decline as windblown dust on its solar panels thickens, so the team has taken steps to continue as long as possible with what’s left,” NASA officials wrote in an update . (opens in new tab) on Tuesday (November 1). “The end is expected to come in the coming weeks.”
Related: NASA’s InSight Mars lander has been spotted from orbit, covered in dust
InSight landed in November 2018, on a mission to help scientists map the interior of Mars in unprecedented detail. The aircraft achieved this goal by detecting more than 1,300 illuminated markers.
“Observing how the seismic waves from these earthquakes change as they travel across the planet provides an invaluable glimpse into the interior of Mars, but also provides a better understanding of how all rocky worlds form, including Earth and its moons. ,” NASA officials wrote. modernize. (InSight was supposed to supplement the earthquake data with readings from a heat probe, but the latter instrument failed to get deep enough underground to do its job.)
InSight has far exceeded its primary mission lifetime of two Earth years. But the clock ticks, thanks to the dust that regularly falls on its solar arrays. The dust buildup got so bad this summer that the mission team had to shut down all of InSight’s other instruments to keep the seismometer suite running.
“We’re down to less than 20 percent of the original production capacity,” InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said at Tuesday’s briefing. “That means we can’t afford to run the instruments around the clock.”
Things got worse after a recent dust storm dumped even more grains on the already crimson InSight. The mission team turned off the lander’s seismometer to save energy during the storm. It’s back up and running now, but the power will probably run out in a few weeks.
InSight’s tight-knit team of about 30 is busy preparing for the end of the mission, including archiving collected data for future science studies and packing up a twin engineering model called “ForeSight,” which had been used (in part) to troubleshooting the puncture heat detector. (These efforts were unsuccessful.)
“We’re going to package it with loving care,” Banerdt said of ForeSight, which will be placed in storage, possibly for use by future missions. “He’s been a great tool, a great companion for us throughout this mission.”
There is no rescue plan for InSight, which launched without solar panel cleaning measures due to weight and power concerns. Sometimes Mars missions get lucky with a gust of wind to blow the dust away, but it’s unlikely that enough wind will come to significantly extend InSight’s life at this point, NASA officials stressed.
Related: NASA’s Mars InSight lander takes dusty ‘final selfie’ as power fades
The agency won’t declare the mission complete until InSight has missed two check-ins with the Red Planet-orbiting spacecraft that relays its information back to Earth, like NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Even after that, NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio dishes will continue to listen in case the lander phones come home.
The team’s focus in the coming weeks will be to extract as much science as possible from Insight, just as they have been doing for the past few months.
“We will continue to make scientific measurements as long as we can,” Banerdt said. “We are at the mercy of Mars. Martian weather is not rain and snow. Martian weather is dust and wind.”
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Because I’m taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) the Facebook (opens in new tab).
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